← Misquoting Jesus with Bart Ehrman
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A
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B
his 80s trying to cross the street, but the traffic doesn't pause long enough for him to cross. A young woman notices his difficulty and runs over to help. Does this woman get any kind of benefit from her action or is it entirely thankless? Today, Dr. Bart Ehrman and I are talking about altruism. Is it possible to do a good deed without experiencing some kind of benefit? Welcome to Ms. Quoting Jesus with Bart Ehrman. The only show where a six time New York Times best selling author and world renowned Bible scholar uncovers the many fascinating little known facts about the New Testament, the historical Jesus and the rise of Christianity. I'm your host, Megan Lewis. Let's begin. Hello everyone and welcome back to Misquoting Jesus. Today we're talking about the concept of altruism which has been on Barthes mind for quite some time. I've also got news on some upcoming events including an Easter themed two lecture miniseries which Bart will be teaching. And for our bonus segment today, Bart is going to be answering some audience questions. Before all of that though, Bart, how are you doing today?
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C
You know, I'm doing great. I'm just feeling really altruistic. The only reason I do the show is just, you know, pure altruism as we're going to see. How are you doing?
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B
Yeah, also good. Don't know if I'm feeling altruistic, but good. Yeah, positive. It's going to be fun. I'm looking forward to it.
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C
You can be altruistic even if you don't feel it.
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B
That's true. That's true.
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C
We'll get into that.
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B
Now before we get into like the real meat of the conversation, could you just define altruism for us? Because if people don't know what it is, we are not going to be making a whole lot of sense today.
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C
Yeah. So yeah. Okay. Altruism. So it actually comes from a Latin word, alter a L T E r, which means other. And altruism is a concern for or an action on behalf of another rather than an action. That's egoistic. Egoism is our egoism refers to actions or, or thoughts or feelings or whatever. Referring only to the self. From the Latin word ego, I. So like, I as in like I am cogito, ergo, assume that kind of thing. So, yeah, so egoism is when you act or you think or you behave or for your own self interest. And altruism is when you act or behave or think in the interest of others.
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B
Now, as we mentioned at the end of last week's episode, and I know we've talked about it previously, you've been writing a book on the subject of altruism recently, which, when did you start thinking about altruism as a research topic?
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C
Well, you know, it, you know, it sounds like it should be something that a philosopher or a psychologist or a, you know, or an evolutionary biologist should be writing about and they've written a lot about it, this kind of thing. But I, I'm interested, I got interested in this because of the history of early Christianity and specifically about Jesus himself. My book is going to be arguing that the understanding of altruism changed with the teachings of Jesus and it transformed the conscience of the West. So it's rather, it's rather a bold claim in this thing. And the, the idea came to mind when I was doing some work for another book I was writing. I wrote this book called Journeys to Heaven and Hell, which was an academic book. But I got really interested in the question of how in pagan circles and in Christian circles they had different understandings. The problem of giving money to charity and the problem of wealth. And, and these afterlife journeys are ways of kind of illustrating the problems, the kind of ethical problems people have in life. And these journey, when people takes a, when people are being portrayed as taking a journey to heaven or hell, usually it's trying to teach some kind of moral lesson. And one of these moral lessons in both the Christian and pagan texts have to do with what about, you know, the problem of wealth. And I came to realize after, you know, I did a ton of reading on this because it's pretty interesting stuff that in Greek and Roman moral philosophy, wealth is a problem. Having wealth is a problem. But the reason it's mainly a problem is because it can do bad things to the wealthy person. Somebody who gets a lot of wealth becomes greedy or miserly or self centered or not generous. And it's a character flaw. And Greek and Roman moral philosophers were interested in developing character. Good for you, good for the society, for you to have a good character. And so wealth, wealth is a problem for the wealthy, but there's no problem In Greek and Roman moral philosophy, at least in the philosophers who are left to us about the problems of distribution of wealth, the fact that some people are fabulously rich, rich, and other people are horrendously poor, and that these inequities are just not fair. But when you get to Jewish and Christian authors, they. That's the issue. It's not personal character so much as it is, you know, it's. It's not right for you to be loaded with money and people to be starving to death. And so it made me start thinking about charity and charitable giving and wealth issues. That led me into the broader issue of altruism generally. What's it mean to live for the self rather than living for the other?
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B
So how does altruism connect with the Bible and early Christianity? How do those. Those things intersect?
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C
Well, the thing I'll say is that, you know, it's not that, you know, it's not that Jesus, like, came up with the idea that he should be good to other people. That goes way back. And in fact, evolutionary biologists have shown that, you know, our species would not exist. It would not have come into existence, it would not have survived if there was not altruism on some level. If, if every. If it's every person for themselves, the tribe will be torn apart. Other tribes that cooperate, cooperating is a good thing if you want to survive. And it's not just in the human species. It's in every species that survived. There's some kind. There are some kinds of altruism where people or other beings, other animals or other plants involved in things that can. Can entail some kind of cost to themselves that could benefit the group. And sometimes it's. It's a real cost. I mean, dart. When Darwin developed the Origin of Species, he had a problem, tried to figure this out, because if. If it's survival of the fittest, then you would think it'd be every person for themselves, but it doesn't work that way. And, and he was. Darwin was kind of obsessed with honeybees. Like, and why do you have these. The situation where these bees, like, you'll have a bee that there'll be an invader, and the bee will sting the invader and it will kill. The act of stinging actually kills the bee. So the bee has sacrificed its life. Well, why would a bee do that? Why wouldn't it? Just like, you know, well, the bees who do that, their. Their group, their bee group survives. And when you don't have bees that do that, their group doesn't survive. And so the bees that survive over long term are the ones who sacrifice. That gets taken into religion pretty early on. And it's throughout the Hebrew Bible that, that love your neighbor as yourself is an altruistic demand that you, that you be concerned for the other. And that's not an invention of Jesus, that's Leviticus 19:18. And so you get altruism as early as you get laws in the Bible and you get it then in Jesus. And the argument in my book is going to be is that Jesus has a revolutionary understanding of altruism.
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B
I'm going to ask about Jesus revolutionary understanding of altruism in a minute, but I wanted to ask first about the, the role or the place altruism takes in maybe Greek philosophy or Roman thinking. Do we see it outside of the Hebrew Bible around this time as well?
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C
Oh yeah, you see it everywhere. I mean altruism on one level is, it's not only a part of our DNA, which it is, it's developed into our DNA because the, our, you know, pre Homo sapien ancestors to survive had to cooperate with one another and do good for one another or they wouldn't have survived. And then humans have. And as soon as soon as humans started thinking about thinking and when they not only acted but started thinking about action, they started realizing the importance of cooperation and of doing things for other people and not just for the self. And so once you start getting Greek and Roman moral philosophy as far back as the classical philosophy philosophers, as far back as Plato and especially Aristotle, you have a lot of talk about how important it is to do things for other people. And this continues to be a thread through Greek and Roman moral philosophy all the way up through the days of Jesus and forever basically. But the deal within, say within Aristotle, Aristotle thought that. So Aristotle wrote this multi volume work called the Nicomachean Ethics and it's, it's arguably the most important work on ethics ever written, probably the most influential ever written. And he devotes, it's 10, 10 books long and 10, you know, we call them books kind of long chapters long. 10 of 10 books. Two of them are devoted to the issue of friendship. And his thing on the friendship is that he has long kind of discussions of this, but of what it means to be a friend, what, what it takes to be a friend, what's involved with being a friend. And wise thinking that's still really worth reading today. But he thought that friends would do anything for each other and would actually sacrifice of themselves for their friend because they loved their friend. So much so it's a very particular, intimate, unusual relationship when you have a true friend. And it, it can mean sacrificing yourself for the other. And so there it is. But, but within Aristotle and throughout the Greek and then the Roman traditions, behaving in loving ways that help other people is almost always limited to those that you are related to, either biologically or socially. So they're either family or friends or people who could, who are in the same kind of socioeconomic class or kind of like you, who could become friends. So it's, it's toward those that you're close to in one way or another.
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B
So what was Jesus revolutionary idea about altruism?
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C
Well, you know, this idea that you should be good to those within, you know, the kind of the group, your friends or your family or things or even within your tribe. You know that Jesus inherited that from the Hebrew Bible. When, when Leviticus 19:18 says love your neighbor as yourself, it is quite clear just within that verse. If you just read that verse, the verse before and the verse after, just read that it's the love your neighbor means love your fellow Israelite, that you are to behave well toward those who are also Israelites and help them when they're in need and so forth. You're not supposed to love outsiders. This is in the book of Leviticus. Right after this, you get the Book of Numbers where the Israelites are told to conquer the promised land and they're supposed to slaughter all the enemies, the Midianites and the Moabites and you know, the Amorites, they're supposed to kill them, but they're supposed to love the Israelites. So love your neighbor that traditionally has met. You know, love people that are, you're close to friends and families and such. And Jesus inherited that. In my book, I argue that Jesus expanded it, that loving your neighbor didn't mean just your fellow Israelite or your family or friend. It meant anybody who's in need. And kind of the obvious place for this that people would turn to just kind of off the bat would be the parable of the Good Samaritan, where it's the enemy of this Jewish man who's beat up, beaten to within an inch of his life and left by the side of the road to die. It's two Jewish authorities pass this person and don't do anything for him. But this hated Sumerian, this enemy of the Jewish people, comes and helps him. And this is Jesus example of what it means to really love your neighbor. It doesn't mean loving just your Family, friend or tribe. It means loving anybody who's in need.
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B
Do we see places outside of the New Testament when Christianity is, is developing more as an independent religion? Do we see this idea of loving people who are dissimilar to you being repeated?
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C
Yeah, well, absolutely. And you, you know, the thing is, you. I, I don't want to say that Jesus is like the only Jew who ever thought of this. There, there, there are also, there are other Jewish teachers that, that have similar teachings in many ways. And so it's not that like you've got all of Judaism, then you got Jesus. And so in my book, I try and make that pretty clear. But the thing is that the reason that Jesus teachings affected our Western civilization and teachings of other Jewish teachers of his time did not, is because Jesus followers took over the Roman world. You know, within 300, 400 years. They're, they're over half the empire. And then they became the civilization of the west and they implemented his teachings rather than other Jewish teachers. And so that's why I focus on Jesus in this. And Jesus followers, of course, they, they heard these teachings and some of them tried to implement them. The problem with the early Christians is that they were human beings, people will be people. And so I am absolutely not saying that, like, Christians were better than anyone else or more moral than anyone else, or I'm not saying any of that. But I will say that Jesus taught that his followers were supposed to be concerned for those in need, even if they were strangers, even if you didn't know them. This has become common sense in our age. I recently, as you know, I recently personally lived through Hurricane Helene. I was in, I was in the hurricane when it hit, and I didn't suffer really much anything, but, but many people really, really did suffer. And the relief efforts right away were just really impressive. And almost everybody who was donating money or who's coming to help or doing whatever were, Was a stranger to these people who were suffering. They were not, they were not helping people. They knew they were not helping people that they would ever know. They were not people they probably like if they did know. You know, it isn't, it wasn't like that. It's like you help people in need or the fires in Los Angeles recently, the, the help that's been poured out for this thing or just earthquakes around the world or whatever. We help strangers in need. And in the Greek and Roman world, that didn't happen. People who were like, who weren't connected with you, you know, you might feel, oh, God, it's too bad they're, you know, their city was destroyed but you didn't like send disaster relief and you didn't go to help them. It's just, huh, that's too bad, you know. And so but with, with Jesus, Jesus says no, you help those in need even if you don't know them. And that's, that's the big difference. That's an altruism with a, with a difference.
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B
Thank you. We are going to take a very brief break. We will be right back.
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D
Imagine this Jesus, the founder of Christianity and the Apostle Paul, its greatest missionary, teaching and shaping the Christian faith with opposing perspectives. While Jesus emphasized repentance in preparation for the coming kingdom, Paul focused on believing in Jesus death and resurrection. So were they on the same page? Delve into the complexities of this debate in Bart Ehrman's online course, Paul and the Great Divide. In this eight lecture course, you'll discover why Paul rarely mentioned Jesus words and deeds and uncover the intricacies of their views on salvation, the Jewish law and ethical behavior. Barthes will also explore the following burning Was Paul a true follower of Jesus teachings? Or is it right to say that Paul transformed the Jewish religion of Jesus to the Christian religion about Jesus? Don't miss this opportunity to explore the profound influence of Paul and Jesus on the Christian faith. Visit Bart ehrman.com Paul to learn more or enrol today. And remember, use the discount code mjpodcast for a special discount.
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B
Before the break, we were talking about what altruism is and how Jesus kind of revolutionized humanity's understanding or at least Western civilization's understanding of altruism by extending it to the stranger rather than just your your immediate circle of family and friends. I want to take a slightly different turn now and ask is altruism actually something that is possible? So the reason I'm asking is I took psychology as a high school student a while ago and remember a couple of very heated discussions in class about whether it is possible to just do something good for someone without receiving some kind of positive feedback as a result of that action, you feel good about yourself, that person thanks you, your standing in society goes up. Any of that stuff is is kind of a positive personal benefit. So. But what what's your thoughts on this? And is is this idea of not receiving anything in return a modern association with altruism? Or did this come through in in the ancient world too?
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C
Right? So these, you know, those arguments you're having in high school still happen in high school and they still happen on college Campuses, and they still happen among experts who spend their life studying altruism. There. There's, as I said earlier, there are, you know, there's a lot, a lot of interest in altruism in the fields of psychology and in the field in philosophy and in evolutionary biology. And so there's a lot written about it. And I think, I think my view is that there are three different things that need to be differentiated when talking about altruism. One thing is, are there altruistic actions? The second is, are people motivated altruistically? Do they have altruistic motivations? And the third is, do people feel altruistic obligations? And so those first two questions are asked a lot by philosophers and psychologists especially. Are there altruistic acts? Yes, of course they're altruistic acts. Sometimes you do something help somebody else. You do. I mean, it happens. It happens. It does happen. That, that does not mean necessarily, though, that you're doing it for purely altruistic reasons. You might have egoistic reasons to do something altruistic. In other words, you might be getting, as you were saying, you might get a huge benefit to yourself, and maybe you're doing it for the huge benefit. Well, then is it an altruistic act? My, my view is, yes, the act is altruistic, but is it an altruistic motivation? That's a different question. And that's where a lot of the debates are. What are the motivations for people? And, you know, you can pick a side and there'll be a lot of people on your side in this particular issue, as, as in your high school class, because almost anything you do, you could see that there might be some egoism involved in it. You know, you do something really, really nice for somebody, but it's because, you know, you want to be known as somebody who does really n for people because it'll elevate your status or people will respect you more or you'll feel better about yourself, or those are all egoistic. And so the, the, the, the question about motivation ends up being, is there anything that you could do that would be purely altruistic? And this is where philosophers and psychologists really get into thought experiments to try and figure out, is there anything you can imagine? And the one thing everybody imagines, everybody I've talked to about it imagines is the soldier who throws himself on a hand grenade that to protect his buddies. That seems like the ultimate sacrifice for others with, without concern for the self. But there's an argument on the other side of that that needs to be taken Seriously. And the reality is, the reason this, I'm calling this a thought experiment is we don't know what's going through somebody's head. You can only imagine what's going through somebody's head. And what's going through the head may be, I'm willing to sacrifice for my buddies, just do it. You know, but you might also think somebody might be thinking, you know, maybe they have religious beliefs that say they should sacrifice themselves for others, and so they're doing this to please God. Or maybe they're thinking that they want to be the kind of person that will do this even if it ends their life. And so it's. So they can be that kind of person. You know, it. It may be so that, you know, they'll be. They'll go down in memory as that kind of person. It may be that they're thinking, if I don't do this, I'm going to be. I'm going to feel ripped with guilt. So, like, in a split second, you can think these things in a split second, I'm going to feel guilty my entire life if I don't do this. And so, you know, they're so. It is true that you can think of egoistic motivations for anything, in my view. My opinion. I'm not saying that pure altruism is impossible, but I think it's impossible to think of something that has to be purely altruistic. You see what I mean?
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B
Yeah. Does motivation play a role or was it seen to be important in any of these historical debates or conversations about altruism? Or was it more. The action itself was really the thing that was worth talking about, and why people did it was kind of irrelevant.
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C
So the, the question of, of motivation, it. It is a modern question really. It goes. But it goes back to the Enlightenment. The, the first one I know of is in the book by Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, very famous and influential book, 1651, where Hobbes. Hobbes comes out and says that any. Anything you do has an egoistic function to it. If anytime you give something to someone else, it is a gift, and a gift is always given voluntarily. If you give a gift voluntarily, it means it's you will to do it. It's your will to do it, and you are willing to do it. You're willing to do it because of you. You get something out of it whenever you give a gift. And so Hobbes argued that everything is ultimately, even if you do something good for someone else, there's an egoistic function and that the modern, modern social scientists, that's the kind of the, that's the standard view still is that most people think there's, there can always be some kind of egoistic motivation behind it.
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B
So what role does obligation play in all of this? We've got the action itself, we've got the motivation. How about social obligations?
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C
So my, what I'm arguing in my book is that, you know, obligation isn't as big of a conversation in philosophy and psychology and things, but it certainly is within the field of religion and you know, are you obligated to do good things for other people? My, my argument in my book is that this is what Jesus was emphasizing is that you, that to be pleasing to God you need to give your life, sometimes literally, but often just, you know, the way you live your life for other people and that you need to live for others rather than for yourself. And that, that this other, that you live for isn't. It's not just your spouse and your kids and your, and your parents and your, you know, literal next door neighbors or, or your friends. It's for anybody who's in need. The Jesus. And Jesus actually pushes this to a fairly radical extreme. In fact, as radical as you can get, in part because of his apocalyptic view. Jesus really thought the end of the world was coming soon and people needed to be right with God before the day of judgment came. And it's not a time for half measures. It's a time to completely commit yourself to God, which meant completely giving everything for the sake of others, including if you're rich, selling everything you have and giving it to the poor and, you know, abandoning your family in order to convert other people. I mean, this is pretty radical, radical demands. But the idea of love your neighbor as yourself, meaning love the stranger as much as yourself, becomes a religious obligation. And that sense was not there in the Greek and Roman world in the sense that you, you help the stranger. You know, you're really concerned about people in need other than your close ones. And it became part of the thinking in the west that not only, you know, yeah, we, we not only do think good things for our, for egoistic reasons, we may have some concern for others, but we actually are obligated to help strangers. That is, I think that is something that comes in with the teachings of Jesus.
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B
Why do you think it's important to think about things like obligation and motivation when we're talking about altruistic deeds? Is it, is it not just enough, enough that people are doing good for their community, for society, As a whole, is it problematic if they're doing those things for, for so, for selfish reasons or out of a sense of obligation?
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C
I guess it depends what you're interested in. You know, if you're interested in results, as most of us are, we're interested in results, then motivation doesn't much matter. You just want the results and you get the results you get. If you're interested in how we work as human beings, like how we, how it is we live as human beings and how we can, you know, think about our existence, then motivation is very important. And if you think about motivation, it can help us personally. Like, if I personally think about what am I actually motivated? Why am I motivated to do, to do this? I do have friends who, who take motivation so seriously that they refuse to do altruistic advice acts because, because they think they're egotistic, egoistic to do it. That's wrong, man. It's egoistic not to do it then too. So, so, but the, the acts are what really matter to me, the effects. If somebody's feeding the poor and they have egoistic reasons, that's fine. I'm fine. I just want them to feed the poor. But on the other, if I wanted to know how our psychology works and how I work as a human being, that matters in terms of obligation. I think it's a very important feature of modern altruism because the sense that we ought to do it affects our motivations and our motivations affect our actions. And so I'm not saying that people should have a huge guilt complex the entire time. They don't help somebody. You. The reality is that the teachings of Jesus are impossible to follow. And I don't know anybody who does literally follow them because anybody who literally followed the teachings of Jesus would be, I mean, they, you know, they wouldn't have any possessions, for one thing. I, I know. So I know a few monks in Eastern Orthodox monasteries who basically do that, but they still eat meals and things and when other people don't. So I, I'm not sure it's possible really to be completely altruistic like that. But if you have, if you know that, you know, really ought to help somebody, then that helps the motivation and the motivation then helps the action.
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B
What do you think, or how do you think Christianity would have developed without this revolutionary concept from Jesus? Do you see in other theologies that it would have crept in maybe later? Or do you think that it, it just wouldn't have been a thing?
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C
You know, the, the thing about Christianity is that It, It's a religion that's. That is rooted at its very foundation in an altruistic act and even within the New Testament. The authors of the New Testament not only point out that Jesus said that you should love your neighbors yourself and that you needed to help other people in need. They emphasize this over and over again without ever using the term altruism and actually without even using the word love. I should say that the word love that is used in the New Testament. Agape is the main word for love in the New Testament. It was not a word ever used in Greek and Roman literature, period. Agape. Agape is a kind of love that is different from the kind that Aristotle was talking about. Aristotle, talking about friendship, talked about Philly, philia, which is a different kind of love, filial, like in Philadelphia, city of brotherly love. And it's more like a love you have for somebody you're connected with, you're friendly with, you have good chemistry with. There's a lot of discourse about erosion. Eros is another Greek word for love. And it tends to mean something that's passionate, often sexual in nature. And there's a lot of philosophical discussion about eros, passionate love. But Christians don't use those words very much. They use the word agape. And the word agape means something more like loving somebody in the sense that you're doing good for them. Like you're, you're, you're helping somebody, you're helping somebody, you're doing a good action. So it's active love. And that becomes the Christian principle that you find throughout the New Testament. A lot of my book is talking about passages of the New Testament that talk about agape that people completely don't understand because. And so they like First Corinthians 13, the love chapter. I have never met anybody really kind of thinks, kind of puts that in its context and understands it, except for a few scholars. So my point is that the Christian authors talk about love, active love, agape, altruism. But it's not just that they talk about it and say that Jesus taught this. The whole point of Christianity is it's rooted in an act of altruistic love. Christ died on the cross for the sake of others. That's at the root of Christianity. Christ giving his life for the sake of others. And so even within the New Testament, it's not just the words of Jesus, it's the actions of Jesus that are to be. Are to be imitated. You're supposed to follow Jesus example. And so I don't think Christianity could have existed without some sense of altruism at its very foundation.
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B
Excellent. Thank you so much. So it, it clearly has been very important in terms of Christianity and the theology of that religion. How has it been influential or has it been influential or important in wider society?
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C
Oh, yeah. So that, that's actually one of the things that motivated me to write this book was I came to realize something I didn't know. You know, for decades as a scholar, early Christianity, it had never occurred to me how significant this teaching was for a governmental policy and for social agendas throughout the world. And still today, Christians invented public hospitals. They. I didn't even know that, but I do now. They did. Christians invented public hospitals. They invented orphanages, they invented old people's homes. They, they invented disaster relief. They invented, in the sense that we think of it today, they invented private charities to deal with poverty and homelessness and hunger. They, they, they invented governmental assistance to the poor because they were poor. These are things that we take for granted. And they're Christian inventions. They didn't exist in the Roman world before this. And so part of my book is having to prove that, because when I say that to people, they say, yeah, well, what about this? You know, what about that? And I say, yeah, okay, yeah, I know about that. But I'm telling you, yeah, until I explain that, that. So, I mean, you know, the idea that you can go to a public hospital, the idea that the government, if the hurricane hits, they send in some money, you know, and they send in the people or that, you know, that there's an old person's home or that, like all of these things, these are Christian inventions. And it's because of this Christian teaching that you should love the stranger in need, and that goes back to Jesus.
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B
That's an awful lot to think about. And I suspect we'll probably have another conversation when you're done with the book so we can get into a little bit more detail. But it is all we have time for today. So we are going to go to our upcoming events and then we have some audience questions.
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E
Welcome to our upcoming Highlights and Events segment where we catch up on Bart's courses, community updates, and all the latest news from the Biblical Studies Academy and beyond.
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B
We have two announcements today. First off, next Tuesday, Bart is going to be hosting another Barth's Spotlight series. And the title of the talk is why Did Romans Hate the the History of Early Christian Persecution. Bart, what kinds of things are you going to be getting into in this talk?
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C
Well, you know, people have A lot of ideas about early Christianity and being persecuted. You know, the Christians are down in the catacombs and hiding out. And they were a secret society, they were illegal. They had to draw secret signs like the fish to each other. And all of that's like, that's wrong, that's wrong. And so what I want to talk about is what really was the case with early Christian persecutions but also why, you know, especially why were Christians being persecuted? I mean Romans generally were pretty tolerant about religion. They didn't really care what kind of religion you had. But why are they persecuting Christians at some point? And so I'm going to be talking about like how it happened that you know, what actually happened within early Christian persecutions and what we know about them, but also what's motivating it. And it ends up being a discussion that is central for understanding early Christianity. That you can't understand the development of Christianity if you don't make sense of this within the Roman world and why it is Romans ended up being intolerant toward a religion when normally they were tolerant of just about everything.
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B
Excellent. Thank you. Now this is an exclusive BSA event. So if you want to watch the live lecture and then have a chance, chance to participate in a Q and A with Bart, all of the details are in the community event space inside of bsa. And if you're not yet a member, as always, you can sign up for a free 14 day trial at bart erman.com BSA now the other announcement. On Saturday, April 5th, Bart is going to be teaching an Easter themed two lecture miniseries called why didn't Jesus disciples Believe he was Raised from the Dead. Now we know the disciples must have believed in Jesus resurrection or there'd be no Christianity. So what do you have planned for us in this course?
- [36:42]
C
But that's a challenging title, isn't it? That'll wake you up. Who came up with that? You know, it's, I'm going to be talking about this interesting phenomenon that throughout the Gospels, when Jesus gets raised from the dead, his disciples don't believe it. They doubt it. Why are they doubting it? And like why does Jesus have to keep proving it to them? What does he have to prove? There he is. And so I'm going to be dealing with the doubt tradition in, in the Gospels, doubt about the tomb, doubt about the appearances and try to figure out historically what's going on here. What, why do you have this tradition about doubt? Why doesn't everybody just believe immediately?
- [37:22]
B
Fantastic. Thank you. Now as always, you can get access to the live recording of the course and all of the courses by being a member of the BSA. Again, the free trial link is Bart ehrman.com BSA or if you just want to purchase list as a standalone course, the early bird pricing is good until March 23rd at bartiman.com Easter 2025 that's Easter 2025 and be sure to use the code MJ podcast for an very exclusive Misquoting Jesus podcast only discount. All right listeners Questions the best part of the show.
- [38:02]
E
Now it's time for questions from listeners where Bart answers real questions submitted by misquoting Jesus fans. If you'd like to submit a question for future segments, Please visit bart erman.com Ask Bart.
- [38:20]
B
All right, Bart, we have four excellent, amazing, very well thought out audience questions. First up, did Luke or the writer of Luke know or use anything from Josephus?
- [38:34]
C
Well, depends whom you ask, as it turns out. So normally the Gospel of Luke and the Book of Acts are dated to the 80s of the Common Era about, I don't know, 20 years ago or so. Some scholars started thinking that in fact the author of Acts and particular who's the same author who wrote the Gospel of Luke was dependent on the writings of Josephus, especially his Antiquities of the Jews that was produced in the published in the year 93. And so how do you show whether one author knows the writings of another author? Well, it helps if they quote the other author by name or helps if they like lift lines verbatim from the other author. But in this case you don't have that kind of thing. There are some things in the Book of Acts that are unusual historical claims that look like they might be based on what Josephus says in his book the Antiquities of the Jews. And so some scholars have argued that these are prominent scholars have argued that the author of Acts knows the writings of Josephus. Other people think that the evidence is thin and that it's nowhere near the kind of evidence you get to show that like Matthew used Mark, nothing like that. But, you know, is it sufficient evidence? If it is, then he had to be writing after Josephus. And people there are, there's a group of people dating the book of Acts to around the year 120 instead of the year 85. And it's certainly possible. But just recently I reread the major scholarship on this and I, I just didn't find it compelling myself. But you know, I I'm a dinosaur and probably the world's going to pass me by on this one.
- [40:23]
B
Thank you very much. We have a question now about prayer. Why do Christians pray to Jesus instead of praying directly to God the Father? Wasn't Jesus essentially just God's middleman on earth? And what is the point of praying to a dead human being anyway? Especially since he apparently isn't coming back anytime soon?
- [40:42]
C
I think the point of the praying to Jesus is that he's not dead. The other point is that he. And so, so I think, you know, it's interesting that within the Christian tradition, including, you know, the tradition I was raised in, the Protestant tradition, people pray to Jesus and Protestants object to the Roman Catholic tradition where people pray to saints or pray to Mary. And the Protestant line is, why, why don't you just pray directly? Why do you need an intermediary? But they also have an intermediary. They pray to Jesus. Why don't they pray directly to God? And they do, of course, they do pray directly to God, but why go through Jesus? And the idea is that just, you need, you know, that the way to the Father is through the Son. Jesus himself said in the Gospel of John, nobody comes to the Father but through me. And so, and so it's. It is this idea that you have an intermediary between you and God. If you're outside the, if you're within the religious tradition, it just makes sense. I mean, just what you're born with, it's just what makes sense. Or if you're outside the tradition, it seems a little bit strange because why can't you just pray to God? Why do you need Jesus? And what, why do you have to go through him? Is it like an amplifier that your prayer gets louder now or something? I mean, doesn't God hear you? And, but, you know, it's kind of the basic question, why pray to God at all? I mean, if you think God knows everything, God certainly knows what you need. Why do you need to tell him you need it? And, you know, and why does he need to be thanked? I mean, he's. What's he. He doesn't need to be thanked. So what, you know, why are you even praying to God? And, and what good does it do to pray to God? You know, people pray, actually get more things than people don't pray. Is that true empirically? So there are all sorts of questions about prayer, and this is one of them, but it's, I don't think it's any more strange than any other religion or just praying to God at all. It's just part of the Christian tradition.
- [42:36]
B
Thank you. We have another question on sources for the Gospels, is there any evidence to suggest that Mark had a written rather than an oral source that he was using which predated him? Or is it more likely that he was simply the first author to collate these stories and sayings of Jesus into a coherent narrative?
- [42:55]
C
Well, there's no way to know because, you know, I mean, it may be that what we think of as Mark is just made up of other pieces of writing stitched together. We don't know. But when I was in graduate school, the common line was that Mark had a written passion narrative and that his passion narrative from chapters 11 onward, 11 through 16 came from a written source. But I never saw really any particular evidence of that. And so the reality is, we don't know. He may have had written sources. He may have been all oral sources. He certainly had some kind of sources because he can't be just making all this up. The reason he can't be making it all up is because you have comparable stuff in other authors that don't know Mark. And so he's not making it up. And so all of it. He might be making some of it up, but I kind of doubt that too. I think he's heard stories. I personally don't see any evidence of their written. They're being written sources before him. The style throughout Mark is fairly consistent. And so it's sometimes like, if you borrow like a paragraph from somebody else, it's a different writing style from your writing style. And so you can detect that can't really do that too much with Mark. So I suspect this is all his telling of it. Rather than taking it from a written source, he could have gotten a written source and rewritten it. That's possible too. But, you know, unless you've got evidence, you don't. You know, if. If somebody wants to argue had a written source, they. They bear the burden of proof. We do know that people were hearing stories, and we do know that people ended up writing down stories they heard. And so that's probably what Mark did, unless you have reason to think otherwise.
- [44:33]
B
Thank you. Fourth and final question for today. How likely do you think it is that John the Baptist and Jesus had any connections to the Essenes? Were their teachings influenced by those of the Essene?
- [44:46]
C
This is a common question. It used to be when the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered, they. They. So the. So the Dead Sea Scrolls are discovered in 1947, and they were. They were a collection of writings by Jews from about the time of Jesus that are usually these group of Jews is Usually identified as the Essenes. These scenes were one of the groups of Jews mentioned by Josephus, the Jewish historian. And they were a group that were particularly concerned to preserve their purity, their ritual purity, without the influences of corrupting culture around them. And so some of them started their own communities, kind of like monastic communities, where they could, could maintain their own rules and regulations and purity rights and things. And so when the scrolls were discovered, people wondered, you know, the message you find in some of these scrolls is an apocalyptic message that the end is coming soon and people need to be ready because destruction is going to come and God's going to intervene in history and, you know, the Messiah is going to come. And it sounds a lot like the preaching of John the Baptist and Jesus. And so were they parts of the Essene community. And many people, you know, people wrote books arguing Jesus was a member of the Essene community. He's mentioned in the Dead Sea Scrolls. And, and not too many people think that anymore. And there are really good reasons for thinking Jesus was not a member of this community. You know, I think one of the big problems that people, people have, scholars have, scholars are increasingly getting this problem. It's one I've mentioned before, that if you've got, if there's a big picture back there someplace and we've got a few fragments from this picture, we connect the dots. And so, like, these are the. Always. If you've got this group that says something and that group says something, well, this one must have been relying on that one.
- [46:37]
B
One.
- [46:37]
C
Well, not if, like there are thousands of groups saying these things, then why would it just be these two groups that are related? And so there's, there's really nothing that connects Jesus with the Essenes who produce the Dead Sea Scrolls or the Essenes at all. The Essenes are not mentioned in the New Testament at all. And the concerns that Jesus has are that Jesus has, are very different from the concerns of the Essenes. Their main concern was not to get mixed up with, with the pollutions of the general populace, the Jewish general populace. They thought the Sadducees were corrupt, the Pharisees were corrupt. They didn't want anything to do with regular old folk. Jesus had just the opposite view. He. His problem was that people were accusing him of hanging out with the lowlifes too much. That's what he did. He said that's why he came to hang out with the low lives, with the tax collectors and sinners. And that's the opposite of the Essenes. He doesn't have concern for purity, rich rules and for purity. So, so I, I don't think Jesus is really associated with these scenes. More people thought maybe John the Baptist was. I don't think so. I think again, it's just connecting two dots that happen to exist. But John is very different from the Essenes in many ways. His, his cleansing ritual, his baptism is not really cleansing for ritual impurity, it's cleansing for sin. And it's not a repeated thing as it was with the Essenes is a one time thing. And so I don't think there's anything that actually ties E to the Essenes except that they all have a similar apocalyptic view that the end was coming soon and people needed to prepare for it.
- [48:13]
B
But thank you so much. Audience thank you as always for your questions. Now, before we finish for the week, would you mind just summarizing what we talked about today?
- [48:22]
C
Well, we've been talking about the phenomenon of altruism, where people behave for the good of someone else, sometimes at a sacrifice to themselves and where that came from and how it's deeply rooted within the Christian tradition and how the specifically Christian form of this going back to Jesus himself ended up having a significant effect not just on human conscience in the west, which it did, as people feel they should help those in need, but also on social agendas and governmental policy in the modern world.
- [48:56]
B
Audience, thank you all for listening. I hope you enjoyed the show. If you did, please subscribe to the podcast to make make sure you don't miss future episodes. Remember that you can use the Code MJ podcast for a discount on all of Bart's courses, including his upcoming Easter Special over at www.bartehrman.com. misquoting Jesus will be back next week. Bart, what are we talking about next time?
- [49:18]
C
Next week's an interesting one we haven't even broached before. People know the teachings of Jesus from the New Testament, basically. But there are a lot of sayings of Jesus outside the New Testament, some of them in gospels, but some of them in other contexts. And these are, these are sayings of Jesus that most people would not know about. And we're going to talk about these. They're sometimes called the unknown sayings of Jesus, which is ironic because we know them, but they are not found. They're not found in the New Testament. And so what, you know, what do we make of these sayings?
- [49:49]
B
Join us then. Thank you all and goodbye. This has been an episode of Misquoting Jesus with Bart Ehrman. We'll be back with a new episode next Tuesday. So Please be sure to subscribe to our show for free on your favourite podcast listening app or on Bart Erman's YouTube channel so you don't miss out From Bart Ehrman and myself, Megan Lewis, thank you for joining us.